


Gifts

by Puffinmuffin



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:55:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28062027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puffinmuffin/pseuds/Puffinmuffin
Summary: "He who carries the Dark Lantern must be the Beast."If only Wirt had known that it had little to do with carrying the Lantern, and everything to do with possessing it.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Gifts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rubber Chicken With A Keyboard (RCWAK)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RCWAK/gifts).



> Many thanks to my fantastic beta, who word-wrangled beautifully so that I could better do justice to this wonderful prompt!

"Pilgrim... He who carries the Dark Lantern must be the Beast."

If Wirt had known that night in the tavern what those words truly meant... If he’d only known enough to look back at the tavern keeper and correct her: to say, no, it had nothing to do with carrying the lantern, and everything to do with possessing it.

Carrying. Possessing. They had similar implications if one didn't understand what it was they were holding, but they meant two completely different things here in the Unknown. Anybody could carry the lantern, after all. It was a physical construct made of glass and copper, as tangible as any lantern he'd ever seen back home. The Woodsman had carried it, a solid, grim weight to bear, and while he'd certainly done horrible things, he wasn't the Beast. He'd simply been another lost soul who had been misled by the creature. Wirt, too, had felt the weight of the lantern in his own hand. It had seemed heavier, somehow, than the materials of its construction, and at the time, he couldn’t begin to comprehend just where that extra weight had come from.

That understanding had come, with time. It had come through years of walking the woods, luminous eyes watching for lost souls travelling through the Unknown the way he and his brother once had. It had come as his skin sloughed off and left something worn and weathered in its wake, pale and smooth like ancient driftwood. Once, before he'd encountered the Beast, he'd been able to run as he pleased. Now, each step he took was heavy and slow, as though hindered by the very water that had been his gateway into the Unknown. The true weight of the lantern had been a difficult lesson to learn, and a humbling one for Wirt, with his flair for the dramatic and his penchant for wordplay. For a time he had found himself looking back on it, on the moment when he had figured it out. He'd had enough of himself left to save his brother. By then, it had been far too late to save himself.

\---

**I'M TRYING TO HELP YOU.**

"You're not trying to help _me,_ " Wirt had protested, staring up at the Beast before him, all gnarled joints and booming voice wrapped in a shadowed, antlered form that threatened to engulf the entirety of the woods. "You just have some weird obsession with keeping this lantern lit. It's almost like _your_ soul is in this lantern."

There had been something to that, that much was clear. The way the Beast's form twitched and writhed had suggested... anger? Fear? Something altogether unsettling, as though reality itself wasn't quite able to keep up with the fury of the creature as it shifted and loomed over him.

In hindsight, the whole display was so over the top as to be ludicrous. Years later he could hardly fathom the fear he had felt, how _small_ he had felt, how completely and utterly hopeless he had felt as the light faded around him, the whole of the forest melting away in shadow to leave only the light of the lantern and the Beast's two, luminous eyes. He could have drowned in those eyes in that moment.

Apparently Wirt had been gifted with a talent for drowning.

**ARE YOU READY TO SEE TRUE DARKNESS?** the Beast had demanded while Wirt had cowered and scrambled for some scrap of courage.

Had he been ready to see true darkness?

As it so happened, Wirt had been.

It had been so simple. Just a single breath, an exhale that had cost the Beast his life and Wirt his soul. The darkness that had followed was complete, all-encompassing, but Wirt had found his way to the Woodsman's axe in spite of that. There in total darkness, Wirt had been able to see more clearly than he ever had. To one side, the Beast, a pathetic screaming wretch made of faces twisted in agony, his grotesque form growing still as tendrils of Edelwood grew up to claim it. To the other side, Greg's very life stood out like a dimly flickering candle, scattering light around them, as though refracted through the recently broken surface of a quiet pond on a late October evening.

Wirt had taken a moment, then, to commit that thought to memory. There was poetry in that, wasn't there? There was poetry in that.

\---

Time passed. Wirt's poetic tendencies faded. So, too, did so much else that had once defined him, drifting away like the silt that kicked up underfoot with every step he took, no matter where he walked, even on dry land.

He didn't know how long it had been since that Halloween night. Time worked differently in the Unknown, with seconds stretching on for an eternity, and hours, days, passing in an instant, like a waking dream. He had awoken back home, had carried his brother to the shore; he was certain he remembered that. He remembered light, remembered lights and sirens, people coming to take his brother to safety. And he remembered falling over, falling into blackness, as the lantern called him back to it again.

He was certain Greg had made it home. His brother hadn't been in the Unknown with him once Wirt had woken up, shadowed by that twisted Beast-tree, staring up with newly luminous eyes at a dozen screaming Edelwood faces all frozen in a horrible tableau. Time had passed here, he could see, and more of it than the moments he’d spent back home. Early winter had deepened into something darker. Beatrice had likely long since returned home, and Wirt had allowed himself a moment to feel happy for her, to hope that she had broken her family's curse. Huddled together in a tree for warmth and eating dirt was no way to spend a winter as stark as this one.

In his hand, he held a lantern. It had a different sort of weight to it than it had before. A weight that seemed comfortable to him, seemed _familiar_ , as though he'd been carrying it his entire life.

He had opened the lantern long enough to peer in only once. One good look at his own imprisoned soul crying out and reaching back toward him with those burning hands had been more than enough. He closed the lantern again quickly, so hard that he'd worried, for a moment, that he'd broken it by force alone, and decided then and there to never look back inside.

\---

At first, he had managed to convince himself that it would be okay. The Beast who had come before him had been a twisted thing who had forced somebody else to carry and tend for his soul. Maybe his hunger for the lives of lost children had been a direct result of him losing the lantern that housed it, of being so far removed from the very essence of who he once was. Who needed Edelwood to survive? Not Wirt, definitely not. He was Wirt. He was nobody, really! He wrote poetry and made mixtapes for a girl he would never again be left breathless in the presence of. He played the clarinet, and, on one memorable occasion, had even done a reasonably decent job of entertaining a host of frogs with a bassoon. He wasn't a predator. He wasn't entirely certain he was even a pilgrim. He was simply... lost. It was the price the Unknown had demanded for the freedom of his brother.

It had been the Woodsman, in an act of misguided mercy, who had first fed his flame. It had been the Woodsman who had cut down one last Edelwood tree before finally going back home to his daughter. A month, Wirt had gone on in denial of his need to feed the flame. A month without fuel and the flame in the lantern had nearly gone out, Wirt's human shape melting away more and more with every passing day that his soul had suffered inside that lantern. Branches like antlers grew from his head, and the Woodsman had found him sitting, lantern on the ground before him, staring up with burning resentment at the horrible thing that had been the Beast who came before him.

The first swing of the axe had made the tree bleed more Edelwood oil than Wirt had seen before, in all his time in the Unknown, and every drop had tasted like sin and agony, like countless wandering souls devoured before their time. It had kept him fed for what might have been days. Or years. Or perhaps it had been centuries of coming back for more, with the echoes of the Beast's voice taunting him each time he returned until the oil had run dry.

**YOU WERE GOING TO BE A BETTER BEAST, WEREN'T YOU? NO HUNTING LOST SOULS? NO TRAPPING THE UNSUSPECTING CHILDREN LOST IN THE WOODS?**

"I still am." Wirt's voice still sounded like his own, he thought, in spite of his twisted shape. It was difficult to tell, listening to himself speak from within and muffled through the glass of the lantern. "I'll never be the Beast you were. I'll see to it that every lost child finds their way out of the Unknown again."

The echoes in the oil had only laughed. Or maybe that had been the wind, howling through the hollows in Wirt's driftwood skin.

Every lost child.

That had been his goal.

Where the last Beast had once followed them, waiting for them to find themselves lost and bereft of hope, Wirt had used the light of the lantern to help them find their way.

For a time.

The days, or years, or perhaps centuries of being an unseen guide, a light in the dark, had only lasted as long as the Edelwood tree he'd been feeding from. Even the Beast's own tree, bleeding with a multitude of countless stolen souls, couldn't last forever. It had been an inevitability that Wirt was always going to have to face: either he could find another source of oil, or he could watch his flame flicker out. If nothing else, running out of oil from the Beast's Edelwood meant no longer having to listen to those mocking echoes.

The weight of the silence once the tree had been exhausted had been unexpectedly deafening.

\---

It wouldn't have been entirely accurate to say Wirt had done some soul searching once his main source of oil had run out. That would have involved facing his soul, and he hadn't had the nerve to look into the lantern since that first time, since he'd faced the imprisoned light of who he once had been. But he had certainly spent some time bargaining, asking himself just how many lost souls was an acceptable number. If maybe, now and again, somebody _didn't_ find their way back home. Certainly not _everybody_ deserved to return home, did they? And not every lost soul was a child, were they? Maybe if he set a limit for himself. Maybe it would be okay if, sometimes, somebody found themselves lost in the woods _without_ a guiding light? Sometimes, some people simply didn't _deserve_ a second chance, did they?

The flame in his lantern had flickered, then, as if asking _What gives you the right?_

He had ignored it.

He had done what needed to be done, following his own rules. No children. Only the worst of humanity, whenever he had the choice. He would only eat the souls of those who had lived the lives of Beasts in their own right. After first cutting his teeth on the oil of the Beast's tree, it seemed like poetry of another sort.

He had found that, less and less, the choice was something he'd had the luxury of. There were far fewer Beasts than children in these woods. The truly terrible often found their way elsewhere, found their way somewhere other than wandering lost for a chance of redemption instead. Occasionally he could slake the thirst for oil with the life of some other creature, but even the viciously corrupting power of the Unknown's black turtles didn't go far enough. The turtles only appeared where the Edelwood already grew, after all, and so they themselves became scarce over time.

No hopeless lost souls, no new Edelwood.

No new Edelwood, no new turtles.

The guiding light was simply succeeding in starving himself again.

He wasn't completely certain when he'd stopped caring, but 'when' wasn't a word that meant much in the Unknown. He simply knew that one day, a child had wandered across his path, and he had watched for a while. Acknowledged the danger that lurked around every corner, looking to consume any who lost hope. And Wirt had let it happen. He hadn't stepped in to intervene. Hadn't used the light of his lantern to show the little lost one the way back home.

The oil from that child's tree had tasted sweet, like honey and despair.

'Banana nut duck bread,' some flicker of memory had suggested. That would go well with honey. Would go well with despair. There had been something so familiar about the way the Edelwood had crept up over the small, frail body once the child had given up hope.

How had he put it, then? While he was laying on his back in the mill, the Woodsman's fireplace casting a warm glow around the room? A boat, wasn't it? On a winding river, twisting towards an endless black sea?

Further and further away from where he wanted to be.

_Who_ he wanted to be.

His poetry had been practically prophetic, then, hadn't it?

Who _did_ he want to be?

He could hardly remember the man he'd wanted to become. He could hardly remember the boy he'd been, or the life he'd had. He remembered his brother. His brother had been the last piece of his old life to slip through his fingers. Or had it really been Greg who had slipped? A frown creased Wirt's driftwood features, and his hand paused on its way to feed more of that honey-sweet oil into the lantern. Why _had_ his brother gone away? They hadn't been particularly close before their time in the Unknown, at least not as Wirt remembered it, but he did remember the panic when he'd woken up alone in the woods, remembered the biting cold of drowning not for the first time, remembered the way his heart felt as though it was going to drop right out of his chest as he and Beatrice found Greg with the branches of the Edelwood already beginning to grow up to claim him...

Very dimly, after a few more moments of reflection, he remembered the sirens, and then the high-pitched screech of his senses giving way into the dark before his return to the Unknown.

After a moment that had stretched on forever, whatever 'forever' was worth, he closed the door to the lantern and left what was left of the lost child's tree there in the woods. Along with it, he left his will to fight the hunger any longer. All he knew anymore was a ravenous pit starving for the satisfaction of a well-fed flame, and that hunger had begun to define him to the core. By now he had grown to understand why the Beast had passed the burden of the torch on to somebody else. Who out there could possibly be more driven about feeding a flame than a father who thought his atrocities were the sole reason his lost daughter lived on?

Wirt had been made that offer, once. He wondered, idly, if the Beast would have sent Gregory home again as an acceptable loss if it meant that Wirt would be saddled with the mantle of Torch-Bearer, thinking his brother's soul to be trapped inside.

And then he realized that it hardly mattered now, and he left that thought, and all thoughts of his old life, to drift away like the silt from his footsteps.

\---

Time meant nothing in the Unknown, and so Wirt couldn't have said for certain just how many years had passed before he came across something that had brought brief inklings of his old life back again. Longer than minutes, he was sure of that much, if only because the figure he was watching from the shadows of the woods had aged far more than _minutes_ since he'd seen him last. It had been years, at least. Decades, probably, though in the Unknown it had been an eternity of autumn giving way to snow, over and over again.

He was following in the wake of an old man, enthralled by the look of him, something familiar about his face drawing his eye. It was rare that he bothered with souls like these; they were so often jaded, never as sweet or satisfying as those who died young, with so much more potential still laid out before them. People like this one, who had lived full lives, were often the sort who found their rest in places like Pottsfield, rising only once a year to remind themselves what life once had been like before retiring to the fields until the harvest came around again. It was unusual that this one moved through the woods with so much _purpose,_ as though he had come here expecting to find something he had lost.

Very few in the Unknown ever found what it was that they had lost. And everyone who remained had all lost the same thing. Once a life was gone, it was gone. That was the one thing that all people shared, in the end.

This man, with a warm smile on his lips and creases at the corners of his eyes that hinted at a life well lived, wasn't walking the aimless walk of someone seeking to discern why he was here. He already seemed to know; there was no hint of hopelessness to him. No sense at all that he was in any way lost. He simply seemed as though he was still deciding where to begin looking, and so he kept himself entertained by singing a soft tune as he searched.

" _They're warm and soft like puppies in socks, filled with cream and candy rocks._ "

It was oddly compelling, that cheerful little tune.

Without ever really understanding why, in spite of all of the reasons why this man was unlikely to ever satisfy his hunger, Wirt tailed along behind, a wraith and his lantern drifting after a single vivid soul.

\---

Wirt followed. For what amounted to weeks in the Unknown, his steps fell in behind those of the familiar stranger who was making his way along the road through the woods, walking a deliberate path forward. First, the man visited a mill. For no particular reason that Wirt could remember, he could have sworn it had fallen into disrepair quite some time ago. He remained out of sight as the man spoke to a young woman at the door with the familiarity of an old friend. They spoke for some time, words he couldn't quite hear, though the man seemed to be asking about... something. The answers seemed to be apologetic, seemed to carry the taste of loss and pain along with them. The two parted with a hug, the young woman closing a door behind her, the song of bluebirds singing a bright counterpoint to the man's determined gait as he continued on his way.

It wasn't autumn, and so the stop through Pottsfield was... uneventful. The man paused to pet a cat, careful to keep a wide berth around the pumpkin vines that were growing off of the fields and into the road. He didn't stay, which somehow didn't surprise Wirt as much as it could have. He seemed, after all, to only be passing through.

But people didn't tend to 'pass through' Pottsfield.

The man's explorations brought him to a school, a proper school, built up over the years with money from benefit concerts performed by surprisingly talented animals. They spent an afternoon listening to one such concert, the old man in the front row and Wirt obscured again in the shadows of the trees. From the school, the man had gone to spend an evening in a tavern, and the music from within filtered out again into the woods, ringing loud and clear with songs about purpose and identity, of people who had every certainty of where they belonged in the Unknown, even if none of them ever truly let themselves amount to anything at all.

They continued that way, moving from place to place. A visit to a mansion with a warm greeting from a man who called him 'nephew.' A trip on a riverboat where he laughed as he made a point to give a pair of pennies to the frog accepting the fare to board. A broken-down cottage with a faint air of smoke that he only lingered near, and then another one where he was invited inside for tea. His company had been so appreciated that the old woman within had let him leave with a single teacup from her set in exchange for a small, porcelain bell that had been tucked neatly in his breast pocket all along.

The old man spent the night after that sleeping under a tree in the woods; his first night outside since his arrival. Wirt had waited until he was certain sleep had come to the man before approaching him, before standing over him and staring down at him with wide, rainbow-ringed eyes. He'd remained there through the night, memorizing every feature of the man's face, trying to place what it was about him that had him so fascinated, before vanishing back into the shade of the woods before morning came to wake him.

The man didn't wander that day. Not far, anyway. By evening he had found his way to a clearing with a stone in it, and he'd placed the teacup atop of it, sitting back to patiently wait while the sun lowered toward the horizon. From where Wirt was standing in the woods, the sun itself seemed to lower into the teacup, a clever trick of perspective that had him drawing nearer to watch.

He hadn't expected, once the teacup had been filled and night had fallen, that the man would speak.

"Hello, Wirt."

Wirt pulled back at that, the glow of his eyes flaring a little in surprise. He didn't reply, simply stood and stared as bright, warm eyes met his own, and a smile that was all too familiar crossed his quarry's lips.

"Beatrice said I might still be able to find you in these woods. 'Look for the lantern light.' It wasn't difficult to spot with you trailing along behind me." He paused, leaned forward a little more, and then murmured, "Beautiful eyes," as though remembering something before breaking into a sudden laugh. "I didn't bring any candy this time. It wasn't Halloween when it happened, you know? It's actually almost funny to see this place in the summertime. I had to wait a few hours longer to lower the sun into a teacup, for starters, but at least the nights aren't so cold."

Wirt's head simply canted to the side at that as something scratched away in the back of his mind. Even the soul in the lantern had gone quiet. It felt heavier in his hand than it had since the first time he'd picked it up, as though it didn't belong there. As though he had no business carrying it around this place, standing in the company of this person who knew him so well.

In another life, he might have taken a nervous breath before speaking.

He had stopped needing to breathe since well back before he could remember.

**YOU KNOW ME.**

It was as much a question as a statement of fact, like there was something just at the edges of Wirt's grasp that he couldn't quite wrap his mind around. The man watched him thoughtfully before replying, something soft and sad settling in upon hearing him speak. No fear, only a gentle melancholy. Pity? Regret?

"It was my job to bring us both home," the man replied. "I was going to get us both home, Wirt. But here you stayed, and there I was. It..." He paused, hesitating a moment before shaking his head. "I won't tell you how hard it was to accept that you were gone. But I'm back now, and here you are."

He fell silent again, this time letting an expectant silence stretch on between them. One that seemed uncharacteristically patient of him, Wirt decided, though he couldn't have said why. Finally, he gave in, speaking the word that was rattling around in his head the most.

**HOME?**

As he said it, he remembered a quiet town, a school. The face of a girl that he felt a sort of embarrassed fondness for and a boy he felt a vicious envy of whenever he was near her. He remembered a mother who loved him very much, and the man she had married, who pushed him to do things that always felt so much bigger than he could manage. And he remembered a child who one night had placed a teakettle onto his head and had declared to the world that he was an elephant.

Home.

"You were missed there," the man offered, and there was something more familiar about him now. Something younger, like the years were giving way to a sort of childlike vulnerability, and the face that Wirt was looking at was reflecting that. "Not just by me and Mom. Dad was broken up about it, too. I know you never really got along with Dad, but he really did care, you know. Not just because he thought you'd have been great in the school band." A pause. A silly little smile. "You would have."

School band? Wirt's head quirked to the other side while he processed that thought. The school that he could clearly form in his mind's eye now, a chance to be closer to... to that girl?

He didn't realize he was shrinking away from the man until he heard the small, concerned noise that was made as he did so, and felt the warm, gentle hand reach out to grab the one that wasn't currently holding the lantern. He froze, eyes casting an eerie blue glow over their hands together, one flesh and one wood, before looking back up to--

**GREG. YOU'RE GREG.**

His brother smiled. It was such a familiar smile, he wasn't certain how he hadn't managed to place it before. Not even the decades could change that smile. Not even a second trip into the unknown.

"Hello, Wirt," Greg said again, and gave his hand a light squeeze. "I knew I would find you in there eventually. Just like I was supposed to, remember?"

That... No. That wasn't right. Greg wasn't the one who was supposed to find Wirt. Greg was the younger brother, it had been Wirt's job to take them both home. And he'd...

He lurched back again as the realization hit him in a wave that left him feeling ill. He'd given up. He'd given up back then, when they were lost in the woods. And he'd given up again much, much later, when he'd become the Beast in earnest. It had been easier to leave himself behind completely.

Almost completely.

The lantern felt so heavy in his hand.

"Please, Wirt," Greg was saying, and Wirt barely understood the words that were being spoken as his mind worked through so many years of being something else. Of being the exact evil he'd sworn once never to become. "I don't think I can bring us both home again, but there has to be somewhere else, right? The Unknown doesn't stop at Pottsfield. I bet you've seen a lot of it by now, huh, Wirt? Where would you go if you could go anywhere at all?"

**WHERE? I...**

He felt like... like he was on a boat. On a winding river, twisting towards an endless black sea.

Slowly, he raised the lantern, holding it up between the two of them. Greg peered at it questioningly, then raised a curious eyebrow as Wirt's fingers reached to the latch, to open the lantern.

To finally peer inside, to meet eyes with something that he'd refused to face ever since the beginning. The flame in the lantern seemed to peer back at him, before twisting around, looking away. Looking through the lantern's glass, trying to get a clear view of Greg.

Where did he want to be?

_Who_ did he want to be?

"Wirt?"

Greg sounded concerned. There was a sort of understanding in his voice that seemed new, unfamiliar. It shook Wirt out of his contemplation for a moment, body _and_ soul, and the flame twisted back toward him again, tilting his head slightly as if to ask the question of him again, and once again reaching out one burning hand in offer.

_Who do you want to be?_

It was an easier question now than it had once been, he realized, as he raised the lantern to look at who he had once been. He wanted to be... him. Wanted to be his brother's brother, wanted to be somebody who had been _worth_ seeking out in the Unknown.

And The Beast could not be that person.

Wirt gave his brother one last look through luminescent eyes.

And then he reached his hand into the flame to grasp that offered hand, the Dark Lantern falling and shattering as the Beast who possessed it began to burn. The wood took quickly, and the fire burned more brightly than anything that had ever illuminated that forest before. He had worried, once, that it might hurt, but as flame crept into the pits left behind and filled his ruined body, he felt only... whole.

The fire burned, smoke rising up in countless wisps that seemed to dance with newly rediscovered freedom.

And then the fire died, and all that was left in the clearing was a single teacup sitting on a rock. If one looked at it from a certain angle, it almost appeared as though the sun itself was rising from it, a brilliant trick of perspective as morning came to the Unknown.

Somewhere, in a place entirely new, brighter than even the glow of the morning sun, Wirt reached to take his little brother's hand in his own.

"Let's go home, Greg. Wherever that is now."

**Author's Note:**

> I want to just say now that the prompt that I got for this fic was pretty much everything that I could have possibly hoped for in a request. As soon as I finished reading my recipient's letter, the skeleton of this fic crawled into my head like the residents of Pottsfield crawl into their vegetables every year, and it rattled around in there until the entire thing was sitting finished, waiting for me to work up the nerve to hit send. I hope this is as much a delight for my recipient to receive on their first Yuletide as it was for me to write!


End file.
